Analyzing Collaborative Talk in a Student Managed Task-based Fine Art Activity

Abstract

Objectives This is a qualitative study of the fine art group activity in the eyes of sociolinguistics. Using conversation analysis, this study aims to scrutinize how the actual collaborative talk dynamics take place in a student managed task-based art activity.
 Methods In order to have a close look at the collaborative talk, we focused directly on face-to-face talk-in-interaction of four students’ during their two hour group activity in a college art class, ‘understanding of contemporary art’. The student managed task-based group activity was a part of liberal arts course especially in the 11th week of spring semester, 2022 at a university in Seoul, Korea. The data was collected via video recording of the two hour group discussion, and the recorded talk was all transcribed for conversation analysis which is the main tool of analyzing students’ talk.
 Results The procedure of students task-based activity included the following four steps: (1) sharing and choosing an agreed task topic to work on, (2) cooperative opinion sharing for making the art work, such as materials and method (3) actual making and art work completion, (4) wrapping up and cleaning. Conversation analysis is a study of turn-taking organization of talk-in-interaction to find how the participants manage and display intersubjectivity in talk. In the students’ talk occurred in the process of the student managed group task, we found several turn-taking types resulting reciprocal support in order to develop the task product: (1) topic change, (2) other-initiated second turn repair, (3) reactive tokens, and (4) other question-answer sequences with mutually supporting verbal and nonverbal moves.
 Conclusions This study is quite valuable in terms that it addressed the naturally occuring process of turn-taking sequences by analyzing students’ talk-in-interaction in depth when the students were engaged in collaborative task-based activity to complete an act work. As noted in the result, most of the various types of turn-taking lead mutual support and agreement of each other’s thought in order to produce the collaborative task completion rather than aggressive debate and disagreement.